Living Repentance
Gate Pa – Year C 3rd Sunday in Lent, 2022
Psalm Psalm: 63:1-8
What I want to
say:
What
does repentance mean this Lent, having described lent as a time to reflect on what
has been life giving for you and us, and to use this time to learn to live in
more thankful and life-giving ways, and last week wondering how we have experienced
God’s faithfulness over these last couple of years.
What I want to happen:
For people to bear fruit of living
gratefully in ways life giving ways that allow us all to experience God’s
faithfulness in even the darkest of times.
The Sermon
1. Introduction:
As
we began Lent, I invited us all to see this lent as a time to reflect on what
has been life giving for you and us, and to use this time to learn to live in
more thankful and life-giving ways, knowing that God is faithful.
Great
themes to begin Lent with.
And
now that we are nearly halfway through, we have the theme of repentance. There is
no more Lenten theme than repentance really. We hear it in the Ash Wednesday
service as the ash is applied – “turn from sin and live the gospel.” And it is there all through Lent. Repent!
But as I have talked about before, the important
thing is what is it we mean by repentance.
2.
Repentance
In
the pew sheet I quoted one of my favourite commentators, Matt Skinner. He says,
“Repentance becomes less interesting when people mistake it to mean moral
uprightness, expressions of regret, or a "180-degree turnaround."
Rather, here and many other places in the Bible, it refers to a changed mind,
to a new way of seeing things, to being persuaded to adopt a different
perspective. It means similar things in other contexts from the wider Greek
literary world.”[1]
What have been your moments of repentance,
when you might have looked at your life from different points of view?
3.
Luke’s story
Our
reading this morning from Luke 13:1-9 is
all about repentance – all about learning to see through God’s eyes. And that
meant learning to see God differently. Jesus lived in a world where God was
often understood as a moral judge who punished
the sinful and rewards the righteous. But here he is inviting his hearers,
including us, to have a bigger view because this is an image that bears no
fruit. So to the question “are these people Pilate killed more sinful than rest
of us?” Jesus answer is a simple “No. they were just as sinful as all of you.
You are the same as those killed. They were not killed because any sin.”
But
then Jesus really seems to muddy the waters with “unless you change your hearts and lives, you will
die just as they did.” [2] And he goes on to tell the parable of the fruitless
fig tree threatened with destruction, which has been interpreted by many as “repent
or perish, or, turn or burn”. Which seems to be the exact opposite of the point
he began with.
I
wonder if there are other ways of reading this.
And
as part of that I wonder where we see the God figure in this parable.
I
suspect that we automatically see God as the owner. We tend to do that. Look
for the most powerful person in the story as see God in that person. And that
can leave with some really awful pictures of God at times.
And
in this story, sometimes the gardener is seen as Jesus, persuading the grumpy
God figure to give us one more chance. But if we don’t take it, we will perish.
The trouble is this doesn’t gel with the images of God offered in Jesus’s
teaching and life, or in much of the rest of scripture. There is so little
compassion or mercy in this picture.
We
need to be open to the possibility that the God figure is another person in the
story.
Maybe the God figure is the gardener. This is a God of second chances. This is a God who desires us to be fruitful and will do what it takes to allow that to happen. This is a faithful God, faithful to us and the covenant.
The question then is how do we live in response
to this faithful and merciful God who gives second chances?
4.
Isaiah 55
Surely this is more like the God we meet in Isaiah
55. A God of outrageous generosity, offering more life than people possibly
need, to everyone who asks no matter how deserving or not.
In our Lenten Study today we are going to read
about Abraham Herschel. He was a Polish Jew from two distinguished Hasidic
dynasties. He completed his PhD in Berlin in 1932 just as Hitler came to power.
It took sometime for his dissertation on the prophets to be published so he could
graduate because of the antisemitism that Hitler gave voice to. In 1938 he was
deported to a detention centre by the Gestapo. 6 weeks before Hitler invaded Poland
he left for USA to lecture at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. He left behind
his family who did not have visas. His mother, three sisters, and almost
everyone who knew him as a child were to die in the holocaust.
What was surprising was that there was no hint
of this social activism before the 1960’s. His daughter Susannah comments that
it was the revisiting of his doctoral
thesis on the prophets as it was prepared for publishing in English in 1962
that most affected him.
Here I am using the material in our Lenten
study written by Dr Geoffrey Troughton. He says that Heschel saw the prophets
not as bearers of timeless truths, but transmitters of “divine pathos”. They are
above all else mediators of God’s emotion, feeling, and passion. From the
prophets, Hershel understood God to be deeply moved and affected by what
happens in the world, and responsive to it. The prophets were in tune to this
and expressed it. He urged that we must see ourselves as not only an image of
God, but a perpetual concern of God… a consort, a partner, a factor in the life
of God. We encounter God “within a situation of shared suffering, of share
responsibility.” This shared responsibility involved taking action, following the
prophets in their “bias in favour of the poor.”[3]
5. Conclusion
Repentance is more than saying sorry.
It is seeing the world through God’s eyes. And
Herschel offers one way of what that looks like.
It is also seeing God with new eyes, in
scripture, in the world around us.
Maybe it is knowing we are a “perpetual concern
of God”, and that “we meet God within a situation of shared suffering, of
shared responsibility.”
I wonder how this Lent this might help us learn
to live in more thankful and in life-giving ways, knowing that God is faithful.
What fruit might grow in our life because of
this?
[1] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-in-lent-3/commentary-on-luke-131-9-3
[2] Luke 13: 5, CEB
[3] p.16. Signs of Life in Loss, by Dr
Geoffrey Troughton. Week 2 of
Sentinels, Discerning New Life. Anglican Diocese of Wellington 2022.
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